Traditionally, thermostats are stand alone devices that monitor the temperature in a given area of a house or office building and work to maintain the surrounding air temperature at a set point. The thermostats would be connected to the controllers of the heating and air conditioning units but would otherwise be disconnected from other thermostats and equipment. Given the ubiquity of networks, both wire line and wireless, in modern buildings, there have been moves to connect thermostats into existing network infrastructures, in large part to allow them to be controlled from a remote location.
There are several thermostats in the present market which can be connected to a remote server via an end user's wireless or wire line access point. This scheme is suitable for smaller residential application where each thermostat maintains its own connection to the remote server without forming any network within the building. The other option available to the users is to use an additional gateway device, which collects and aggregates data from the thermostats (and other devices supported by the gateways). In such system, in addition to this extra gateway equipment, the system does not provide any redundant means of maintaining the external communication, in the event the dedicated gateway fails. What is needed is a networking thermostat that does not require separate gateway equipment.